February 6

It's a day before the half-break holiday and the kids are definitely showing it. In the P7 classroom, the week has been dedicated to finishing working on their Shakespeare presentations. The students are very excited because after all their hard work they will finally be able to present them to the rest of the class, as well as to the other P7 class. Yesterday we did a little comprehension work, finished and typed the creative stories that they have been working on, finished our angles bit in math, and then in the afternoon they had work time for Shakespeare. Today they had gym first thing in the morning, and then we did D.O.L and some grammar. After that I continued with their RE unit in which we are focusing on respect for others and the community. For this, I told them that Earth was becoming overpopulated and we needed to create a new planet. This new planet would be just like Earth in terms of environment, climate, and animals, the only difference is there would be no people. I then told them to choose groups and gave them descriptions of 20 different people, all having different occupations, ages, and abilities. With these, each group was to decide what 10 people should go and start a new community on this new planet. They had a lot of fun with this, but were also very thoughtful in who they would pick. We then talked about the reasons why each group chose certain people and the response was because of their strengths and abilities. I then asked each person to tell me one of their strengths and weakness. It was interesting because when asking this, most of the students had an answer such as "I'm good at Playstation" which wasn't an answer that I thought would be classified as a strength. Being with this class for 5 weeks now I'm not at all surprised by this response. When we come back from half-term I will be doing this same lesson to the other P7 class to see if the responses will be the same or different. Both P7 teachers are also interested in seeing what happens because the demeanor of the classes is so different.

Well, Kim and I are off to London tomorrow night. We are very excited! We will be staying in London for 4 nights and then traveling to Paris for 2 nights. Many of the teachers here have given us a lot of advice as to what sites we should see so we have lots of places to go to. It should be a great time!